Damping modelling in aircraft flutter analyses

The aeronautic industry is moving towards the research for more and more performing materials in order to make the aircrafts increasingly lightweight, and to get a decrease in consumption and atmospheric pollution. These materials result in viscoelastic behavior that is difficult to analyze with traditional structural damping models typically used in design stage. In particular, appropriate description of the damping may become critical for the study of flutter stability margins which may ultimately lead to the initiation of limit-cycle behavior. This paper aims to introduce a first-principle-based viscoelastic damping formulation to be applied to aeroelastic systems describing highly flexible aircraft in order to critically assess its influence into flutter and stability analyses.